"I'll Be Back in an Hour. Are You Boys Sure You Know What You're Doing?"

Friday, November 09, 2007

Joe Biden Speaks

Every now and then he manages to get from one end of the street to the other without rhetorically flinging himself into traffic or head-first through a plate-glass window and landing in a three-tiered wedding cake. Without going on a tangent that ends up in a different Zip code from his original point. You hold your breath watching him do it, waiting for the disaster.

Either way, and speaking as someone with a 50-50 chance to vote for a Democrat next year, there's good sense in these words:

When he asks groups of Democrats if they think the American people are stupid because they elected George W. Bush twice, most respond that, yes, they do, he said. He said he thinks that attitude is a real problem for the Democrats, who fail to understand how smart and pragmatic the American people really are.

... “It’s not even so much they don’t trust, which is a piece of it,” he said. It’s that they think that “the way to win is the Bill Clinton triangulation and the Karl Rove angering.”

“It’s the thesis that you go to your base because people don’t vote. Well, why don’t they vote?” he asked. He said he thinks people don’t vote because they’re tired of the way politicians treat them.

He said Democrats would do better if they stopped dividing the electorate by playing to their base and instead brought people together. He criticized the left wing of his party for demonizing the rich and Republicans.

“Rich folks are as patriotic as poor folks, but we don’t talk that way,” he said.

The Democratic frontrunners err by running what he calls a 20+5 state strategy to win the general election, he said. They want to win the same 20 blue states the party always wins, and five more. It’s a plan to make a play for Ohio, Florida and other tossup states “and hope you draw to an inside straight.”

“I don’t want to be President if that’s the way I have to win, because I can’t govern that way,” he said. He said that as President he would hope to have enough red state support to get his legislation through Congress.